


Invisible People

by crickets



Series: Names and Curses [4]
Category: Lost
Genre: Incest, Multi, jawyercita, mmf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-15
Updated: 2007-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:53:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Five Times Jack Leaves)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Invisible People

**Author's Note:**

> [Original post](http://crickets.livejournal.com/55118.html).

**1.  
He’s already gone.**

It’s summertime, sticky and slow, and they’re on the run again, this time in an aging pickup somewhere in eastern Tennessee. The air doesn’t work and their skin sticks to the seats, but they don’t mind it.

T-shirts, tank tops, and dirt on their feet, and it feels like home again.

Jack fills the tank while Sawyer and Claire argue in the front cab over the radio, shoving and swatting, groaning and grunting, like two children.

She wins, offers a salty open-mouthed kiss to seal the deal, and gives a barely audible moan before they part, Sawyer’s hands disappearing somewhere Jack can’t see.

He feels himself harden with the want of them, face flush because there are people around, knowing they would never understand. And just for a second, he wishes he didn’t need them as he does, imagines how simple things would be if he were on his own, closes his eyes and the truck is empty, and he is relieved.

And in this moment, he is already gone.

**2.  
A part of him wants this.**

They don’t argue. Perhaps if the mountains weren’t always morphing into oceans, they would sink into the pettiness that real relationships call home. He wonders if it isn’t because it’s not _real_ either, that they’re only pretending that they can go on, that they can ignore the reality of their impossibility forever.

One day Claire reaches for him, out in the open, stretching their legs. They are invisible people, the three of them, and nobody sees, but still, he pulls away from her warm hands, says words that can’t be taken back, swallows them too slow.

Sawyer’s jaw tightens and he shoves Jack hard and just like that their cover of anonymity is broken, eyes boring into them for the first time since the beginning. They’re people again, with faces and names and angry voices rising high into the cloudless afternoon sky.

And somewhere in the distance, a part of him wants this.

**3.  
They spend hot nights in new towns.**

They spend hot nights in new towns, and he’s on the outside already. He puts himself there, shoves them closer together with invisible hands.

It’s on the nights he drifts the farthest away that they pull him back with forgiving eyes and soft words. _Come back to bed, Doc,_ Sawyer will whisper when he sits alone in the dark kitchen, soft tongue tracing hard flesh.

_Where are you? Where did you go?_ Claire wonders aloud as she wraps herself around him. And the truth is that he doesn’t know. He’s so far away, _so gone,_ and even if he wanted to stop it, he couldn’t.

**4.  
She’s nothing like Jack imagined.**

There’s a stale odor in the air, and she’s nothing like Jack imagined. She’s small, like Claire, and mouthy, like Sawyer – the reasons he picked her – but she’s nothing more than a failed experiment.

She’s a nurse, probably older than she admits, and she takes him back to her apartment after work for a messy fuck following the obligatory _drinks._ During sex, she moans those stereotypical anything-but-sexy lines that desperate girls are taught to say, because she really _is_ a little older, and maybe he’s the one to finally make an honest woman out of her.

But he’s not.

He hears them from the hall when he gets home, not surprised they started without him. He sits outside the open door, listens to their fucking. Sawyer says all the things Jack knows he means but won’t say in front of him, whispers them low, and they come hard, fast, together – and Jack _knows._

**5\.   
They won’t fight for him.**

One afternoon, bloody from surgery, he gets a call, a warning, an escape. His breath stills and he fights his way back to his office. He’s been waiting for this. It’s the same, but different, because this time he’s finished.

He calls Sawyer, and words come out empty. _It’s time,_ he says, and then quietly, _I’m not coming with you._

_You sure about that, Doc?_ Sawyer’s voice is pained, yet not surprised.

Last chance, _I’m sure._

_Well, alright then,_ and it’s slipping by. They won’t fight for him.

_Oh, and Sawyer?_

_Yeah, Doc?_

_Take her with you,_ and it’s gone.


End file.
